Complex Sites

Get Your Weekly Digest

Search

COMPLEX participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means COMPLEX gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.

1

"I’ve always been obsessed with this shoe, and it’s basically the proper Forum High. Not the mid that has become the high, you know by default — it’s actually the Forum High. The first time I seen the Forum was in the late ‘80s, and I equated it to a drug dealer’s shoe. As I was coming up, the Forum was over $100, in ’88 - ’89, which was outrageous; you know it was retarded, so the only people that could actually wear that shoe were people with money. And just by the nature of the sneaker market back then, as you know, things were created in limited quantities, not because it was a strategic marketing plan or whatever, everything was super regional and that shoe wasn’t sold in a lot of places. So you know, it would pop up in Philly, Boston, Baltimore, NYC, wherever else.

"I remember it being a super lux, tonal suede with this crest embroidery on the side. It had gold foil, and it had a basketball and it said ‘Forum.’ I always would talk to adidas about it like ‘yo you remember this?’ [adidas:] ‘No, no, no’ [Him]: ‘Any archives, any pictures?’ [adidas:] ‘No we don’t really have anything like that, a lot of that shit’s in Germany. So I started doing the research myself. I hit up a couple dudes — DJ EMZ in New York, Air Rev, who is a renowned sneaker guy that was at Puma then, and DJ Mighty Mi from Philadelphia that was in the rap group High and Mighty, he’s in Las Vegas now. Air Rev, you know Adam [Leaventon], he’s the one that plugged me in with everybody else. I knew of EMZ, but through that process of trying to find the shoe I got to know EMZ, and got to know how this shoe came about."